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Canonical Comments On The Unity 2D Defenestration

Phoronix: Canonical Comments On The Unity 2D Defenestration

Jason Warner, the Ubuntu Desktop Manager at Canonical, acknowledges that dropping Unity 2D and going with Unity-Over-LLVMpipe may lead to some regressions and that some users will want to stick to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS or switch to another desktop environment...

Hoping for LLVMpipe to pick up the slack / iron out the issues is wishful thinking. Unity 3D will simply not be usable without hardware acceleration on the low end of the spectrum. On Ivy Bridge / Haswell and later, it'll work fine, but on systems that don't support GL2 because the hardware doesn't, you aren't going to get good performance, period.

Hoping for LLVMpipe to pick up the slack / iron out the issues is wishful thinking. Unity 3D will simply not be usable without hardware acceleration on the low end of the spectrum. On Ivy Bridge / Haswell and later, it'll work fine, but on systems that don't support GL2 because the hardware doesn't, you aren't going to get good performance, period.

Well Ubuntu did choose to fight the problem at the right leve. Bad rendering is a matter of fixing drivers and getting the right hardware. reinventing UIs is not the solution. Who want QML anyway these days? It is less of focus for the ever-changing Qt-owner. No need to hype QML, Qt has its own marketing division, they can do the talking. Qt on windows/IOS/anything non-linux is the hot stuff right now. Canonical knows and they are backing.

Why Unity over LLVMpipe?

LLVMpipe only works decently on modern CPUs.
All modern CPUs now have built-in GPUs too.

So whats the point of Unity over LLVMpipe?
It won't benefit users with modern CPU since they already have a GPU, and it wont benefit users of older CPUs because LLVMpipe don't work good without AVX and new stuff from modern CPUs.

"systems with decently modern CPU architectures and non-GPU accelerated hardware should be able to run Unity"

Which exactly are those? Pentium 4/Pentium M definitely not. It's too old and doesn't provide proper GPU, let alone CPU acceleration. Core Duo neither. It's too modern and pretty capable for hardware GPU acceleration. The same can be said about contemporary AMD offers. So what CPUs is he talking about?